7 Principals of Logo Design (or brand identity)

A great brand identity or logo is a true reflection of the business it symbolizes. It represents a thoughtful and meaningful organization and its core values.

Logo when used effectively creates a 'personality' for your brand and invites people to get associated with it. The same perception should be communicated via all touch points to reflect a consistent brand image. Your brand represents your mission, your vision, and, in essence, your services/products. It’s what you say, how you sound, how you look, and even how you act. It all adds up to an authentic representation of who you really are.

Below are 7 principals of modern day’s logo design:

1. Unique Identity

Usually when creating a new identity with a new name it is critical to ensure the legibility of the name. You are asking people to recognize a new brand and sometimes even learn a new word. Make it legible and don’t make them work too hard. The goal for the best logo is to have a single, bold expression that would separate itself from its surroundings.

Both IBM & National Geographic logos are iconic and very uniquely identity their respective brands.

2. Engaging with Brand Loyalist

In Digital age, everyone is working hard to grab attention. Brands succeed when they break through crowd culture. Branding techniques should generate cultural relevance to connect to their audience. Also today, the way and speed with which people discover, process and share information has changed. If your brand logo resonate with wider culture, your fans will create content for your brand and hence turn into brand loyalist.

3. Associating Brand Name

Corporates spend significant amount of money & effort on marketing to associate their name with logo/symbol. A great logo design should solve this problem. Look at logos of brand such a Nike or Apple, they have avoid double identification i.e. symbol & name separately.

4. Brand Extensions

There is a critical symbiotic relationship between brand logos and brand extensions. First, well designed brand logos can offer an important strategic advantage that facilitates the success of extending a brand name to other product or service categories. Once successfully introduced, brand extensions make brand logos more visible and prominent, reinforcing the brand’s key benefits.

Virgin have successfully used their core logo/brand identity by extending to various businesses.

5. The Psychology of Colour

Colour is what catches the eye. Significant studies have been conducted into the value of logo colour and the effect it has on the human mind. It’s a fact that certain colours lead to certain reactions. For a start, you may discover that red creates aggression.
Take for example a call to action. Studies have shown that bright orange is the best colour for encouraging people to click, whereas red comes in second.

Coke and Orange used timeless bright red and orange and became phenomenal brands.

6. Empowering

A great logo should be modern and yet be timeless in its course. Some logos have changed little over time, only tweaked to make them more modern but keeping essential elements intact, like UPS, Starbucks and Burger King.
Don't just focus on a single static execution of an icon or logo, consider the branding system at large.

Starbucks continue to use original mermaid since 1971.

7. Timeless

Rather than imposing strict guidelines and rules for when and how a logo may be used, great logo design should develop key principles so they can be more relevant across the wide range of various touch-points that pop up every day. This enables them to make more timely decisions with greater creative freedom while still tying it back to what the brand is about.

In essence, for your logo to do what it’s expected to, you first must understand what your value and meaning is to your customers and best prospects. Then, by following above-mentioned design principles that are the foundation of some of the world’s best logos, you’ll have a symbol that stands for something.

As Paul Rand's quote: "A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important than what it looks like." The starting point must be about business and product outcomes not aesthetics, as these will serve as the criteria to evaluate the success of the design.